Digital ink technology enables a user to write and draw on the touch-sensitive screen of a handheld PC or other writing tablet with a stylus or other pointing device, providing a convenient means for applications to accept input from a user without using a keyboard. For a user, taking notes or drawing sketches with using digital ink technology is very much like writing or drawing on paper.
Often, a single handwriting sample that is input via digital ink technology includes both text and drawings. The drawings may be intermixed among the text, and may even encircle the text. Although displaying a text/drawing digital ink file is not that difficult, often a user desires to have the text recognized by the computer receiving the digital ink file. Recognizing the text may be difficult, however, because the digital ink technology may not be able to distinguish the drawings from the text.
To address this problem, many handwriting recognition technologies assume that handwriting input by a user is text. Although this solution works well when the handwriting input actually is text, if a digital ink file does include both text and drawings, the assumption is not correct, and the accuracy and rate of the recognition decreases.